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Omnis cellula e cellula
.”
“Huh?”
“Your boy Waters and I corresponded a bit, and in his last—”
“Wait, you read your fan mail now?”
“No, he sent it to my house, not through my publisher. And I’d hardly call him
a fan. He despised me. But at any rate he was quite insistent that I’d be absolved
for my misbehavior if I attended his funeral and told you what became of Anna’s
mother. So here I am, and there’s your answer:
Omnis cellula e cellula
.”
“What?” I asked again.
“Omnis cellula e cellula,
” he said again. “All cells come from cells. Every
cell is born of a previous cell, which was born of a previous cell. Life comes
from life. Life begets life begets life begets life begets life.”
We reached the bottom of the hill. “Okay, yeah,” I said. I was in no mood for
this. Peter Van Houten would not hijack Gus’s funeral. I wouldn’t allow it.
“Thanks,” I said. “Well, I guess we’re at the bottom of the hill.”
“You don’t want an explanation?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m good. I think you’re a pathetic alcoholic who says fancy
things to get attention like a really precocious eleven-year-old and I feel super
bad for you. But yeah, no, you’re not the guy who wrote
An Imperial Affliction
anymore, so you couldn’t sequel it even if you wanted to. Thanks, though. Have
an excellent life.”
“But—”
“Thanks for the booze,” I said. “Now get out of the car.” He looked scolded.
Dad had stopped the car and we just idled there below Gus’s grave for a minute
until Van Houten opened the door and, finally silent, left.
As we drove away, I watched through the back window as he took a drink and
raised the bottle in my direction, as if toasting me. His eyes looked so sad. I felt
kinda bad for him, to be honest.
We finally got home around six, and I was exhausted. I just wanted to sleep, but
Mom made me eat some cheesy pasta, although she at least allowed me to eat in
bed. I slept with the BiPAP for a couple hours. Waking up was horrible, because
for a disoriented moment I felt like everything was fine, and then it crushed me
anew. Mom took me off the BiPAP, I tethered myself to a portable tank, and
stumbled into my bathroom to brush my teeth.
Appraising myself in the mirror as I brushed my teeth, I kept thinking there
were two kinds of adults: There were Peter Van Houtens—miserable creatures
who scoured the earth in search of something to hurt. And then there were
people like my parents, who walked around zombically, doing whatever they had
to do to keep walking around.
Neither of these futures struck me as particularly desirable. It seemed to me
that I had already seen everything pure and good in the world, and I was
beginning to suspect that even if death didn’t get in the way, the kind of love that
Augustus and I share could never last.
So dawn goes down to day
, the poet
wrote.
Nothing gold can stay
.
Someone knocked on the bathroom door.
“Occupada,” I said.
“Hazel,” my dad said. “Can I come in?” I didn’t answer, but after a while I
unlocked the door. I sat down on the closed toilet seat. Why did breathing have
to be such work? Dad knelt down next to me. He grabbed my head and pulled it
into his collarbone, and he said, “I’m sorry Gus died.” I felt kind of suffocated
by his T-shirt, but it felt good to be held so hard, pressed into the comfortable
smell of my dad. It was almost like he was angry or something, and I liked that,
because I was angry, too. “It’s total bullshit,” he said. “The whole thing. Eighty
percent survival rate and he’s in the twenty percent? Bullshit. He was such a
bright kid. It’s bullshit. I hate it. But it was sure a privilege to love him, huh?”
I nodded into his shirt.
“Gives you an idea how I feel about you,” he said.
My old man. He always knew just what to say.
Chapter Twenty-Three
A couple days later, I got up around noon and drove over to Isaac’s house. He
answered the door himself. “My mom took Graham to a movie,” he said.
“We should go do something,” I said.
“Can the something be play blind-guy video games while sitting on the
couch?”
“Yeah, that’s just the kind of something I had in mind.”
So we sat there for a couple hours talking to the screen together, navigating
this invisible labyrinthine cave without a single lumen of light. The most
entertaining part of the game by far was trying to get the computer to engage us
in humorous conversation:
Me: “Touch the cave wall.”
Computer: “You touch the cave wall. It is moist.”
Isaac: “Lick the cave wall.”
Computer: “I do not understand. Repeat?”
Me: “Hump the moist cave wall.”
Computer: “You attempt to jump. You hit your head.”
Isaac: “Not
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